![]() ![]() Zennstrom and Friis developed Kazaa a bit more and by around 2003, it became the most downloaded piece of software ever. Kazaa was initially built by some programmers in Estonia and then purchased by two guys: Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark. And better yet, no one person could really be held accountable for facilitating piracy since the file wasn’t stored on a central server anywhere-though as we’d see later, the people that actually owned Napster and Kazaa eventually got sued anyway. So the magic of Napster and later, Kazaa, was that when a popular file-say, a music file labeled HumptyDance.mp3-was made available on the network, everyone could download it really fast. And the more people who have the same file on their computer, the faster it could be sent to someone trying to download it. The more people who are on the network, the faster the network can send files back and forth. The basic structure of a peer-to-peer file sharing network is that whoever’s on the network is connected to everyone else on the network, with no official, central server or group of servers sitting in the middle holding all the files. Kazaa enabled people to share music files but it also let people share videos and programs as well, which made it very, very popular. Kazaa, in case you don’t remember or have never heard of it, was a peer-to-peer file sharing program used by millions of people in the early 2000’s just as Napster was getting shut down for enabling the illegal sharing of music files. But unlike buying a human writing machine like yours truly at an affordable price, Microsoft is paying $8.5 billion for something called Skype. Not to get too personal, but that’s many, many billions more than I make in a year.
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